Searching for Language to Capture How Climate Change Has Altered Our World

A drowned world: It’s an ancient fear and a very old story. Noah and his biblical flood, a tale likely descended from the even older story of Utnapishtim in the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” but there is also Da Yu and the flood that supposedly inspired China’s imperial feats of hydraulic engineering, Brahma and Manu, and, perhaps oldest of all, the 10,000-year-old tales of certain indigenous peoples of Australia, who sing of homelands lost beneath the rising waves at the end of the last ice age. Most of these tales take the form of a warning and an elegy, and now Elizabeth Rush’s deeply felt “Rising” joins that long tradition.

This is a book about language, first and foremost, a literary approach to a real-world problem. So while facts and figures do find their way in, conveying how fast the waters will rise or how far the sea may ultimately intrude, they are not the main focus, unlike, say, in Cynthia Barnett’s illuminating and gorgeous “Rain: A Natural and Cultural History.” Instead, this book is interested in a new vocabulary — using words like “rampike” (a tree killed by saltwater intrusion) or the naturalist’s lingo of tupelo, catbrier and bull (rush, not animal). As Rush argues: “I believe that language can lessen the distance between humans and the world of which we are a part; I believe that it can foster interspecies intimacy and, as a result, care.”

Just as a wetland can adapt to rising sea levels through the process known as accretion — the slow buildup of organic material as the marsh lives and dies — so too does the accretion of detail here help make the case that the seas have already risen as a result of human-driven global warming, affecting Americans who confront this change on every coast with feelings of loss, fear and confusion. Even the maps have changed; in the most recent government surveys, Louisiana has shed the names of 31 bayous and other coastal features. Those bayous have slipped beneath the waves of living memory, along with some 1,900 square miles of land...

(review of RISING: Dispatches from the New American Shore, continues)